Well, no sooner did I declare that SpringSource was building an empire than the company added another province with the purchase of Hyperic. Hyperic’s technology will allow SpringSource to add application management features to its software stack. (tc Server was was already touting its application management features, but never mind that for the moment). SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson declared that this was part of his company’s goal to create a unified application lifecycle from developer to datacenter.This is definitely an intriguing move, and is indicative of SpringSource’s ambitions. Of course, its importance can be overstated, and overstated it was by CNet’s Matt Asay, who declared that the acquisition left SpringSource, a VC-funded startup, ready to take on Microsoft and IBM, two of the largest corporations in the world. The comparison is somewhat deranged on a number of levels, both because of the vast disparities in size and because, as William Vambenpe points out, the end-to-end solution hasn’t even been completely assembled yet.Still, there is one germ of truth to it. Just as Spring is supposed to be enterprise Java rebooted, with all the really important stuff everyone actually uses and none of the cruft that’s in the Java EE spec because we all thought we would need it five years ago, so too is SpringSource’s product line meant to be a streamlined version of the development and deployment tools offered by the megaplayers. The problem is that every company was a little guy before becoming a giant; that cruft gets there because you try to offer everything to everyone, because that way you make more money. It will be interesting to watch SpringSource evolve and see if this is an inevitable process, even for organizations that are aiming specifically to avoid it. Software Development